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A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

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Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#271

Post by cubefox »

joshuaissac wrote: post #227
mrtksn wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm curious what "its own vision" was The JS and CSS and HTML box model worked differently, the websites were displayed correctly only on IE or only on other browsers. People put text that says "best viewed in Internet Explorer 6" at the bottom of the page or straight out blocked users from displaying the page in other browsers and encouraged them to download IE - just the same thing we have with Chrome today when…

> The JS and CSS and HTML box model worked differently This was required for compatibility with Netscape. Developers coded for the Netscape box model when it was dominant, so Microsoft had to follow the same model to prevent the pages from breaking when viewed in Internet Explorer.

Neither Mozilla nor Opera did that, so apparently they didn't have to.

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#272

Post by IX-103 »

sneak wrote: post #124
kramerger wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have all kinds of weird excuses for not using Firefox. Sometimes it feels like "Sure, Chrome sold my kids data to human traffickers. But I can't switch to Firefox because I really _need_ MIDI-2 over websocket support" Sure, FF is not perfect but a lot of issues is due to sites being optimised for webkit and that will not change as long as Chrome has 80% marketshare. You need to sacrifice a little for freedom.

Chrome is a lot more robust and secure against exploitation than Firefox is. This is a very unpopular fact, and every time I point it out the rabid Mozilla people get upset, despite it being the truth. I use Ungoogled Chromium.

I wouldn't say "a lot". Though the multi-process model Chrome uses and the V8 sandbox do provide a lot of security isolation (more than just running the browser in a VM). Though a lot of these protections are disabled on low-end mobile devices because of the associated overhead. Firefox has been making good progress implementing some of the same isolation mechanisms and is farther along rewriting components in Rust to avoid memory safety issues.

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#273

Post by worrycue »

robin_reala wrote: post #138
worrycue wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly Firefox is barely a hedge against Chrome. When it comes to things like JPEG-XL they are in lock step with Chrome. Safari ended up being JPEG-XL’s unlikely champion. I kind of wished Apple would release Safari for other platforms again.

We can see exactly Mozilla’s position on JPEG-XL: https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#jpegxl JPEG-XL includes features and performance that might differentiate it from other formats, but the benefits it provides are not significant enough on their own to justify the cost of adding another raster image format to the Web.

Yet it supports AVIF, a a directly competing format ...

There is nothing neutral about supporting one format and not supporting another.

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#274

Post by Kiro »

fsflover wrote: post #254
Kiro wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My games, which are not using any special Chrome features, work horribly on Firefox and not at all on Safari. Until that is fixed no amount of bullying will make me switch. Not that it's a successful tactic to begin with.

Did you try to fill bugs in Firefox's bug tracker?

I have and actually gotten a couple of them fixed in a timely manner. One was even marked with highest severity so it's not like I'm hallucinating this or doing something wrong. The team clearly cares about fixing performance issues. With that said, it's not always easy to create a minimum working example reproducing some things (general low fps, stuttering, unstable rendering, sudden black screens, strange audio artifacts).

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#275

Post by joshstrange »

jwells89 wrote: post #266
joshstrange wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been saying this for years (on HN and elsewhere). In my mind, there are two types of “IEs”. There is the IE that didn’t follow standards and did whatever they wanted and there is the IE that was slow to adopt new standards. Chrome is the former and Safari is the latter. Also, Safari is no where near as slow as IE was to adopt standards so I don’t find it great comparison.

Additionally, Safari at least has the fundamentals in place — IE couldn’t even render transparent PNGs properly without Windows-specific filter trickery until around version 9 or so which was released in 2011, around a decade after Gecko based browsers, WebKit-based browsers, and even Microsoft’s own Tasman-based IE for Mac did.

People are quick to forget the pain of things like table-based-layout.

I’ll never forget in 2006-2008-ish I developed a website for my computer repair business (I was in High School) and was very proud of it. Then I opened it in IE (I had developed it in Firefox) and it all fell apart (I was using floats IIRC). I then rewrote the whole thing using tables because I knew my target audience would not be running Firefox.

In Safari sometimes things aren’t aligned correctly but nothing to the degree of hacks I’ve done over the years for IE. Gradients, transparent pngs, rounded corners, the list goes on.

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#276

Post by Kiro »

simon_o wrote: post #240
Kiro wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My games, which are not using any special Chrome features, work horribly on Firefox and not at all on Safari. Until that is fixed no amount of bullying will make me switch. Not that it's a successful tactic to begin with.

[flagged]

People clearly care since that's the whole point of this thread. Sounds like you are the one who should grow up.

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#277

Post by goku12 »

bjord wrote: post #241
goku12 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like people who don't like what Chromium does, but still uses it along with uBlock. It feels to me like the web needs another engine, not chromium reskins, to stay healthy.

it'd be a step in the right direction if one of the "new" browsers trying to do cool things were using gecko (firefox's engine)

I agree with the sentiment. But the main reason I have heard from browser builders is that Gecko isn't as easy to integrate as Blink. Nyxt browser, for example, is engine-agnostic. They still have trouble integrating Gecko. Servo, on the other hand, is designed with embedding in mind. They have picked up some pace after joining the Linux Foundation. Libweb (Ladybird's engine) is also a candidate. Let's hope that current situation spurs them on.

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#278

Post by Semaphor »

Semaphor wrote: post #72
tommiegannert wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IE was absolutely hated for not evolving. I'm curious what "its own vision" was, other than "do as little as possible, while Mozilla and Opera keeps pushing forward." Now, this is from the perspective of the web developer. I don't think IE was ever hated the same way from the end-user perspective. Chrome is still innovating, but now end-users hate it, because it's trying to be too much. The "new IE" hat still belongs…

Later, IE was also hated for being tied to the OS (which was related but different to the "not evolving"). Another thing Safari has. So yeah, I also fully agree. Safari is still the new IE.

If you downvote me, please tell me why my comment is wrong. Otherwise, no one learns anything.

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#279

Post by saiya-jin »

tommiegannert wrote: post #64
mrtksn wrote: post #57

Remember the "Safari is the new IE" narrative? Just because Safari doesn't support some API doesn't make it IE, IE wasn't an inferior browser at the beginning either. What made IE the IE everyone hates was its departure from standards(?) and enforcing its own vision of the web thanks to its enormous market share. On IE's case, MS probably stagnated it to prevent competition against its desktop Apps business and on Go…

IE was absolutely hated for not evolving. I'm curious what "its own vision" was, other than "do as little as possible, while Mozilla and Opera keeps pushing forward." Now, this is from the perspective of the web developer. I don't think IE was ever hated the same way from the end-user perspective. Chrome is still innovating, but now end-users hate it, because it's trying to be too much. The "new IE" hat still belongs…

> Chrome is still innovating, but now end-users hate it, because it's trying to be too much

First time seeing it, I personally don't like how much power Google is getting with ownership of Chrome, and they already try to force direction of whole world into places that benefit them at cost of whole mankind (ie wasm, tracking everybody to hell, trying to fight adblocks).

Having 1 core browser and no competition is plain bad, Google wins and everybody else loses down the road. That's enough to get opinion and use Firefox + ublock origin. Getting a better version of Internet via that is a nice bonus.

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#280

Post by foobarbecue »

sph wrote: post #142

What is the excuse of all people reading this thread in agreement and still using Chrome? As I mentioned elsewhere, this is preaching to the choir. A choir of Chrome users. Google wouldn't be so dominant if tech people like us would stop making lazy excuses to continue its hegemony. In Dante's Divina Commedia , there is a circle of hell for those too lazy to take a stance [1]. If it were written today, it would inclu…

I'm afraid to switch because:

- Chrome dev tools is consistently amazing and I use several extensions on it

- I use google password manager which is also amazing and it works seamlessly on all my android devices, even filling passwords into android apps (although most people don't seem to know it exists)

Sooner or later, I will get around to switching back to FF, but it's daunting. I used FF before Chrome came out.

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